Church of the Churchless

Everything doesn't happen for a reason. Often things just happen.

Having written a book about karma (specifically, the karmic rationale for vegetarianism) called "Life is Fair," I'm well acquainted with the idea that everything happens for a reason.

For karma, when stripped of its supernatural notions of reincarnation and such, basically is just a law of cause and effect. You do this, you get that. Pretty damn simple. What complicates things is that while the effects are clear, in our life or the world at large, the causes are generally hidden to a large extent. 

In Eastern philosophy this may be due to actions in previous lives bearing fruit in a present life. You wronged someone in the sixteenth century. Now that person is reborn, as are you, and does something nasty to you.

I no longer believe in that religious view of karma. However, I'm still very much a believer in cause and effect, or determinism, since it seems clear that this is how the world works.

That's one reason why I'm enjoying Fluke by Brian Klaas, so much, a book I first wrote about here. Though the subtitle, "Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters," implies that life isn't deterministic, actually chance and chaos involve causes and effects as everything else does.

But when the cause of something is unknown, we call it "random." Actually, randomness is another word for our ignorance. Klaas explains this in a footnote:

When I mention "random" events, I always mean apparently random -- events that seem random to us due to our ignorance. A dice roll produces an unpredictable outcome that appears random to us, but it isn't random -- each roll of the dice is a deterministic event that follows the laws of physics.

Apparently random events still have definite causes, though they're not part of some larger hidden purpose. (As far as modern science can tell, the only phenomena in the universe that may be genuinely random are quantum effects at the atomic and subatomic levels.)

In this passage Klaas sounds a lot like Robert Sapolsky in his book, Determined, which argues persuasively that free will is an illusion. Both men say that praise and blame aren't really justified. Sapolsky looks at this from the perspective of determinism; Klaas, from the perspective of chance and randomness.

Yet, if luck plays such an important role in success, that should affect how we think about fortune and misfortune. If you believe you live in a meritocratic world, in which success is doled out to the most talented individuals rather than partly by accident or chance, then it makes sense to claim full credit for each success and blame yourself for every defeat.

But if you accept that apparent randomness and accidents drive significant swaths of change in our lives -- and they do -- then that will change your outlook on life.

When you lose at roulette, you don't kick yourself for being a useless failure. Instead, you accept the arbitrary outcome and move on. Recognizing that often meaningless, accidental outcomes emerge from an intertwined, complex world is empowering and liberating. We should all take a bit less credit for our triumphs and a bit less credit for our failures.

Here Klaas speaks our tendency to ascribe more meaning to events than is justified. Again, when he says that some things just happen, this doesn't mean that they pop out of nowhere. Rather, they happen without an apparent reason, because the cause(s) are hidden from us. Since this ignorance can be uncomfortable, we humans have a strong desire to make up spurious reasons for something happening.

We're particularly prone to inventing and clinging to false explanations in the face of seemingly random misfortune. We can't easily accept randomness as an explanation for why we get cancer or end up in a car accident. Bad news requires something behind it that makes sense. It's impossible to move on from misfortune without figuring out the real reason for your suffering.

It becomes a quest for an elusive meaning in what may have been a meaningless calamity. "Everything happens for a reason" is a coping mechanism most often heard when jobs are lost, when we're blindsided by breakups, or when people die.

While it can help to make sense out of the senseless, comforted by the myth of a neat, ordered plan for everything, the saying isn't true. It's a useful, reassuring fiction. Some things -- even important and maddening and horrific things -- just happen. That's the inevitable result of an interconnected chaotic world.

Accidents, mistakes, and above all, arbitrary neutral changes create species, shape societies, and divert our lives. 

No free will is the secular version of karma

It had to be. During my religious days -- well, make that 35 years -- I wrote two books that addressed the subject of karma.

In God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, karma was secondary to my main theme of spirit being the creative power of the cosmos. But in Life is Fair, the whole book was about this spiritual law of cause and effect.

Now, when I've become an atheist, I'm fascinated by the strong neuroscientific and philosophical arguments against free will. What's interesting is that no free will is almost exactly the same as karma.

Guess I was meant to not believe in free will. 

Of course, often karma is viewed as having supernatural elements, especially in its Eastern religious form. Karma is seen as extending over multiple lives, through reincarnation. But otherwise, no free will is the secular equivalent of karma.

To demonstrate this, below are some quotes from the literature of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for those three and a half decades.

I assembled these quotes in the course of my research for my first book. I read, or rather re-read, every book in English published by RSSB and took notes on various subjects concerning how mysticism and the new physics could relate.

Here's some of what the RSSB books say about karma, which sounds just like the notion of no free will, leaving aside the references to God as being the overseer of karma and mentions of past lives. Every quote is from a book written by one of the RSSB gurus, such as Charan Singh and Sawan Singh.

The Karmic Law is supreme on the material and mind planes, and nothing happens of its own accord, spontaneously, so to say. The law governs the planes; therefore, no haphazard happening of events takes place anywhere, whether the events are of microscopic or astronomical dimensions. (Sawan Singh)

According to the layer of our Karmas that comes into action, our Lord makes people act towards us in that way. So we should never blame anybody. (Charan Singh)

Our present life was marked out in the minutest detail, even before we were born, and no change can be made in that now. (Charan Singh)

No person, dead or living, can influence the life of another person. That is settled strictly according to the law of Karma. You go where your attachments are and you reap what you sow. These are eternal laws which work in this creation and every soul is bound by them. (Charan Singh)

Everything in our life is predestined according to the karmas of our past life, but this does not preclude all effort on our part. The effort that we make is also part of our destiny. We, in fact, have no free will as we call it... our will is very limited and what we call free will is all circumscribed by our birth, the family we are born into, the country, the education, and so forth, over which we had no control. All these circumstances have moulded our thoughts and we act and think accordingly. (Charan Singh)

There is no necessity to worry because whatever is destined, whatever has to happen, has already happened, is already destined. (Charan Singh)

We cannot think why should we do anything if it is already written in our destiny and we will get it automatically anyway. If a thing is in your destiny, then your way of thinking will be to develop it. We are all just like puppets who are dancing, and the strings are being pulled by Him according to our karmas. The realized souls and the unrealized souls are all dancing in the same way. The only difference is that the realized souls know that He is pulling the string and the unrealized souls think that they are dancing by their own effort. (Charan Singh)

If we look at it on a grand scale, from the top down, we have hardly any free will at all...We may say that this is my decision, this is my free will, but we forget what has led us to make that decision, to think in that direction... So, on a broader scale, we have absolutely no free will at all. Everything was planned, so to say. But with our limited view, looking from here up, we have free will. (Charan Singh)

We cannot know what is our karma or what is in store for us... Karma will be taken care of automatically. We should not try to analyze what is our karma or what is not our karma, for that will take care of itself. (Charan Singh)

What destiny has planned for you will come to pass without any planning on your part. Your destiny will cause you to act and make effort according to its plan. Destiny and effort go hand in hand. One is as much a part of the other as the sun and its rays. (Jagat Singh)

Life is a matter of material chance, not divine dispensation

The truth can be disturbing. Yet truth is immensely valuable. These two truths about truth present a dilemma to religious believers. They don't want to be disturbed, so they choose to accept falsehoods about reality.

By contrast, people like me who don't believe in religious fantasies are able to accept both truths about truth. We embrace disturbing facts such as the non-existence of God, no life after death, and the contingency of life on Earth.

That last fact is discussed by Buddhist skeptic Stephen Batchelor in an appealing little book that consists of talks he and his wife, Martine, gave at a 2016 retreat in England based on the Korean Buddhist tradition. 

I'm enjoying "What is this? Ancient questions for modern minds." Here's some excerpts from a talk Stephen Batchelor gave. His theme is how amazing existence is, even though no God designed the cosmos or is overseeing how it operates.

Yet today when I read popular books, listen to a radio programme or watch documentaries about the discoveries of the natural sciences, it often evokes in me feelings that might best be described as religious. I find the sheer scale and vastness of space and time overwhelming.

And I become acutely aware of the poignancy, the utter contingency of existence. 

Contingency means that, on the one hand, something arises contingent on other conditions, which, in turn, are contingent on yet other conditions, ad infinitum.

And, on the other hand, we make 'contingency plans' because we realize that what we prepare ourselves for might suddenly get thrown off course by circumstances we hadn't foreseen coming into play.

Such notions of contingency are very close, I feel, to what the Buddha meant by paticcasamuppada, usually translated as 'dependent origination' or 'conditioned arising'. Remember, in the early sutras the Buddha says that the person who sees such conditioned arising sees the dharma, and the person who sees the dharma sees conditioned arising.

So there's something very much at the core of the Buddha's teaching which has to do with waking up to what I would call the utterly contingent nature of experience.

...In terms of the cosmic timeframe, we are latecomers on the scene. The first human beings anatomically identical to us -- who, when naked, would have been indistinguishable from us -- first appeared somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand years ago. 

Which is really just the blink of an eye. And how long we will manage to remain here is anyone's guess.

The fact that all of this has happened seems entirely accidental and arbitrary. This is difficult for human beings to accept. We like to tell ourselves stories that explain how special we are. We invent concepts like 'God' to show how the story of life on earth was designed in such a way that would culminate in humankind, made 'in the image' of God.

The idea that humans could actually be a purely contingent and haphazard event we find deeply uncomfortable. We have an instinctive sense that we're so much more than just a pure accident, that there must be some reason for our being here.

Buddhists may not speak of God, but they nonetheless have developed theories of karma, which attempts to explain how over countless lifetimes we have been reaping the results of our previous actions that lead us to getting born in one place rather than another, and as one kind of creature rather than another.

This too explains why we exist; it provides reasons that we can get our heads around. It makes us feel that we are meant to be here.

According to classical Buddhist theory, this has been going on forever -- since 'beginningless time'. But the natural sciences simply don't back that up. We have emerged, it appears, out of purely physical conditions by random mutations and chance.

In principle, I see no reason why Buddhists should have an issue with this explanation of how life evolved; it accords well with the principle of conditioned arising. But I suspect many of them, like their theistic brothers and sisters, find this account rather chilling. It makes them uncomfortable.

If everything is the product of chance, rather than the moral consequences of our karma, it cannot account for the dignity and special opportunities of being human. 

But given what we now know from evolutionary biology, we have little choice, I feel, but to swallow the fact that these pre-modern explanations might simply be wrong. The fact is that we're here and, as far as we know, these material conditions alone are what gave rise to us being here.

Three comments show absurdity of "karmic blaming"

Karma can be a dangerous concept. It's harmless enough if we simply think of it as the laws of cause and effect that guide our universe. 

But when people extend this concept to include supernatural fantasies, such as that our actions in past lives have determined what happens to us in this life, then the notion of karma needs to be criticized harshly. The not-nice canine in the Dilbert comic strip, Dogbert, captured the essence of this nicely.

And it doesn't matter whether someone uses the term "karma" or some other word. It's the idea of karmic blaming that has to be fought.

Wikipedia describes Jewish deicide, the idea that because Jews were responsible for Jesus' death, they deserve horrible things being done to them. 

Jewish deicide is a historic belief among some in Christianity that Jewish people as a whole were responsible for the death of Jesus. The antisemitic slur "Christ-killer" was used by mobs to incite violence against Jews and contributed to many centuries of pogroms, the murder of Jews during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust.

Even more directly, India's highly discriminatory caste system, which persists to this day, is based on religious ideas about karma and reincarnation. 

There is a vital link between Karma theory and the caste system. Karma theory is based on Law of Karma, where an act or deed done by a human being, good or bad, accompany the dead soul and determine the soul’s destiny in its future births. A soul will get reincarnated as human being or animal or insect, according to the accumulated good deeds or bad deeds done in the previous lives.

The position a soul occupies in the hierarchy of the caste system closely correlates to the accumulated deeds of the past. A person of good deeds will be reborn in the higher caste, for eg., as a Brahmin, and a person of bad deeds, as a dog or a Chandala (a lower caste). Please refer to Kaushitaki Upanishad or Chandogya upanishad to get more information on this.

So today I was eager to squash the ravings of frequent commenter "777" to the illogical bits that they deserve when he strongly implied, if not outright said, that Steven Hawking's ALS disease was the result of bad karmas -- and that suffering people need to learn from their mistakes in past lives.

I found this so insulting to Hawking and other people who suffer that, as you can read below, I called out "777" on his lack of compassion and deluded religiosity. I forgot to add that if he's so convinced that he's right, he should be using his real name in comments rather than hiding behind a pseudonym.

Here's our comment exchange, plus a right-on comment from JB who further demolished the rantings of "777."